The invention relates generally to automatic imprinting equipment and more specifically to equipment for imprinting symbols, text, logotypes, indicia and other information on elongate tapes such as award ribbons and the like.
Mechanized equipment for the production of imprinted tape such as award ribbons and the like is commonplace due partly to the simplicity of the product and also to the quantities of awards typically presented at various races, contests, competitions and shows. Oftentimes, production runs of between one hundred and several thousand ribbons will be involved. Such numbers militate against manual production but also suggest that the most automatic and high-speed equipment are likewise undesirable and unnecessary in the majority of cases. Thus, while automated equipment is preferred, such equipment need not be of an extraordinarily complex and high-speed design.
Various machines have been designed for producing award ribbons, imprinted tape and similar products. Typically, such machines produce serial imprints of a design, symbol, text or indicia, along the length of a ribbon. Subsequent operations on other machines may then cut or trim the ribbon or tape as desired. Certain prior art devices have combined certain functions such that printing of a ribbon or tape may be followed directly by trimming, cutting or similar operations. Whether combined onto a single machine frame or performed on various machines which require the transfer of the ribbon from one machine to the next, a multi-faceted problem which all known prior art devices have in common is what may be characterized as efficient, unattended production. Obviously, it is uneconomical for such a machine to require full-time supervision by an operator who simply observes the production of the machine. Nearly as obvious is the consideration that the machine not produce a multitude of defective products, if running unattended, which are costly from the standpoints of both a lost material and lost machine time resulting from the necessary repetition of the production run. By way of specific example, prior art machines have not incorporated any sensing means to determine the existence or non-existence of the ribbon or tape supplies. Thus, in spite of the fact that a tape supply may have become exhausted, the machine may continue to cycle, consuming valuable time and energy without producing a product until an operator corrects the problem. With regard to machines which utilize heat sensitive transfer foil, the same difficulty exists. That is, in prior art machines, when the foil tape has become exhausted, the machine typically will continue to cycle but produce no useable product until the foil tape deficiency is corrected. Furthermore, this problem may result in significant material loss since embossing of the award ribbon will continue but without transfer of the foil. The embossed image on the ribbon will render such unusable and necessitate destruction of whatever lengths of ribbon passed through the machine while the supply of foil tape was exhausted.
Another problem with such prior art imprinting machines relates generally to the same area of machine operation in production but more directly involves the components of the machine itself. Oftentimes, such sequential machines will operate from a control device which incorporates no feedback. That is, the machine controller simply issues commands by pneumatic or electric means to imprinting and cutting devices in a unidirectional manner and does not receive or manipulate data to confirm that such steps have, in fact, been executed. Again, this may result in production time loss and material waste inasmuch as the unattended machine may cycle for several minutes or longer before a malfunction is detected and corrected. Such machines also suffer from a lack of adjustability in that ribbon length, location of imprint, etc., may be unadjustable or may be adjusted only by mechanical means with substantial difficulty through repeated adjust and test procedures.